I’m totally amazed that they pulled that off so well.

That’s been their MO for a long time now. In the runup to the 2000 election, Al Gore’s inarguable main strength was his championing of the Internet, such that “{whatever} superhighway” (derived from his coining of the term “Information Superhighway”) had already become a well-worn joke format. Karl Rove took Gore’s perfectly defensible - and actually 100% true - claim that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” and through simple repetition turned it into “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet”, making Gore seem like a crazed person. Which helped Bush Jr. get elected and cemented the GOP’s current control over the Supreme Court.

“Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!”

I have literally 30 years of Visual Basic 3 experience. Somehow, nobody is impressed.

This is why I always assumed that any attempts at deportation would be shambolic. Too many Republican business owners employ undocumented immigrants for them to tolerate actual mass deportations. That being said, I’m sure they’d be mollified with prison labor - which I think is coming.

WW2 is more of a call of duty plot

It’s the war Tom Hanks won.

Doing a nazi salute while making the Mussolini face, no less!

the white flag stereotype for France comes from 2003

It actually comes (unfairly) from the French army mutinies of 1917 and (also unfairly) from France’s surrender to Hitler in 1940, in addition to their not joining in the fun in Iraq. All of which obscures a prior thousand-year history of kicking the shit out of people.

can be ditched by Elon as scapegoats if the need arises

Needs a catchy phrase to go with it. How about “Night of the Long Knives”?

That laptop lol.

My brother gave me his Facebook credentials so I could use marketplace without bothering him all the time. He’s been a liberal left-winger all his life but for the past few years he’s taken to ranting about how awful Democrats are (“Genocide Joe” etc.) while mocking people who believe that there’s a connection between Trump and Putin. Sure enough, his Facebook is filled with posts about how awful Democrats are and how there’s no connection between Trump and Putin - like, that’s literally all that’s on there. I’ve tried to get him to see that his worldview is entirely created by Facebook but he just won’t accept it. He thinks that FB is some sort of objective collator of news.

In my mind, this is really what sets social media apart from past mechanisms of social control. In the days of mass media, the propaganda was necessarily a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Now, the pipeline of bullshit can be custom-tailored for each individual. So my brother, who would never support Trump and the Republicans, can nevertheless be fed a line of bullshit that he will accept and help Trump by not voting (he actually voted Green).

Republicans for decades have targeted people with a 5th grade reading level. Trump’s main “innovation” was targeting a 3rd grade reading level.

A couple other entertaining Access facts: 1) Access databases did at least have an audit table - which was manually editable; 2) Access databases were used by the Diebold electronic voting machines that were in use in numerous states during the 2000 presidential election cycle. It’s possible that 1 and 2 are unrelated.

On a more amusing note, I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow around 2008 or so and running afoul of a dude who was still making a living doing Access work. I’ve never been more fearful that a person online was going to track me down IRL and attempt to kill me.

Fun Hitler fact (as if there is such a thing): the phrase “Night of the Long Knives” was coined by Hitler himself in a speech given shortly after the event, although he used the phrase to describe what Ernst Rohm had allegedly been planning himself. The media instead attached the phrase to Hitler’s actions, much against his wishes.

It still seems kind of insane to have a helicopter at 200 ft. and a plane in the same place at 500 ft. - since the helicopter and plane only need to be at slightly different altitudes from that to crash, which of course is exactly what happened.

I know many people who have fallen in love with Rachel Maddow.

“The Art of the Deal”

The book Trump has never even read (according to the guy who actually wrote it).

Seems like a situation rife with abuse.

Just like leetcode - where you’re helping train the AI that will replace you while not getting a job.

Long ago (mid-90s) I had a coworker who was one of the last people alive who knew still how to program Cyborg, a 1970s-era programming/database platform that was still a legacy platform for a lot of companies. His job entailed making very small changes to the codebase and then waiting literally hours (sometimes days) for the shit to compile. He ended up being able to work from home for three different companies concurrently, making $300 an hour from each company. $7200 per day for about 15 minutes of actual work - while living in rural Texas.

I use the Android app, so at least I don’t have to endure that.

Nothing in modern software design blows my mind more than the tendency to replace line-wrapping with truncation and ellipses. It’s like designers couldn’t get to sleep at night if there were any possibility of their layouts being variable height.